About us

A world class research centre

The Constitution Unit conducts timely, rigorous, independent
research into constitutional change and its consequences. Our research has
significant real-world impact, informing policy-makers engaged in
constitutional reform both in the United Kingdom and around the world.

Constitutions change, and do so frequently. Contrary to popular perceptions of
constitutional documents as static, roughly five national constitutions are
completely rewritten every year, and another thirty are amended in some way.
These numbers underestimate the true amount of constitutional change, however,
because they do not take into account changes to constitutional conventions,
judicial interpretation, and statute law. In the UK, which famously lacks a
clearly-defined written
constitution,
these factors are of course crucially important.

The Constitution Unit was created in 1995 to aid
policy-makers involved in changing their constitutions. Robert
Hazell founded the Unit initially to conduct detailed research and planning
on constitutional reform in the UK, and Unit members have conducted influential
research on every aspect of that programme. Our publications
include reports, books, and articles in both academic journals and mainstream
media. We prioritise providing timely evidence to policy-makers, and our work
has had substantial real-world impact. Unit
members have thus helped the UK navigate an extraordinary period of
constitutional reform. We continue to advise on future UK developments, but
have expanded our role to also assess the effects of reforms that have taken
place. Our current interests particularly include parliament,
elections,
the
judiciary and the civil
service.

While the Unit's work has always had a comparative flavour,
in terms of learning from arrangements in other countries for Britain, we are
now also increasingly involved in constitutional change outside the UK. Our overseas research is facilitated by the
Unit’s association with the Comparative
Constitutions Project (CCP), which has collected data on virtually every
constitution written since 1789, and the Constitute website.